A new twist for the big dipper

This is more like it, I think, sinking into the bubbling seat of the 750e as Craig Trusson slips on a Rod Stewart CD and hands me a glass of rosé.

I am “wet testing” a top-of-the-line Beachcomber hot tub (the manufacturer numbers its models after BMWs) at Home Counties, Trusson’s showroom in the south-east of England. While the experience fails to live up to what is, for me, the ultimate hot tub scene – Al “Scarface” Pacino up to his neck in a froth-filled tub, cigar in one hand, champagne bottle in the other, surrounded by blondes, shortly before going down in a blaze of cocaine-fuelled glory – it is, at least, a start.

I have, apparently, been wrong about hot tubs or, rather, out of date. They are no longer the domain of the neckchain-dangling bachelor but, instead, virtual temples to healthy, green and stylish living.

In fact, when I talk to Andy Tournas, president of Thermospas, the largest hot tub retailer in the US, the conversation focuses not on hot, wet nights beneath the stars but on arthritis and baby boomers’ weak knees. His company, in collaboration with the US Arthritis Foundation, has developed the Healing Spa tub, targeted squarely at the 1970s jogging revolution generation, many of whose joints are now failing.

He cites a study by the American Physical Therapy Association showing that people recovering from knee replacement surgery with the aid of regular water immersions did so more quickly and with less pain than patients undergoing only conventional treatment. And the palliative power of a personal hot tub, steps away from one’s back door, doesn’t stop there. Invoking medical studies of insomnia, Tournas goes on to extol the merits of water therapy as a prelude to a blissfully sleep-filled night, as opposed to a blissfully sleepless one.

When today’s hot tub habitués are not easing themselves into a good night’s rest, they are exercising – and not in the way that Hugh Hefner promotes. “One of our biggest growth areas is swimspas,” a device in which you toil, Sisyphus-like, against an endless current, Tournas says. His company is about to introduce into the UK – eons behind the US in terms of hot tub evolution – an ultra-deep exercise tub. “You don’t just sit there and relax; it will come with a whole set of exercises to do.”

He acknowledges that hot tub marketing did initially, in the 1970s and 1980s, target party-loving singles. “But that quickly became a very small portion of our market,” he says. From buying advertising in publications such as Playboy and Penthouse, the industry switched to Christian Science Monitor and Better Homes and Gardens. One of the biggest boosts to the hot tub world in the past decade has been what Tournas calls “personal use of a tub”, i.e. bathing alone in one’s own back garden. It becomes, he says, habit-forming.

People will also pay for a guilt-light tub. One area in which, if you scratch beneath the marketing surface, the hot tub retains its association with shameless profligacy is in the large amounts of energy required to maintain a constant, high temperature and produce all those bubbles. But property developer Cherokee has included a model in its Mainstream GreenHome demonstration project to show that there are more eco-friendly options. The waterjets can be operated separately (perfect for those solo sessions), the pump is powered by solar photovoltaics and recycles its waste heat back into the water and the LED lighting has to be changed only every decade.

James Hedgecock of the US Hot Tub Council (and I do hope they convene in one) ends his summary of hot tub development – from the advent of the Jacuzzi brothers’ pioneering brand in the 1950s through the heyday of the libidinal bachelor and the skinny-dipping hippy – with the idea of the “backyard vacation”, the centrepiece of which would be a sleek, sophisticated, gently steaming hot tub.

Though Trusson acknowledges that his climate-challenged compatriots remain wary of outdoor bathing, he too sees great hope in the potential of the hot tub to reunite the British family around a sort of aquatic version of the dinner table. The appeal, he insists, is intergenerational.

I would like this idea more were it not for the Oedipal shiver it gives me, only accentuated by news of the Amoré Bay hot tub, complete with anatomically correct his-and-hers seats, “strategically placed jets” and “curvaceous lines”. The wild heart of the hot tub pumps on.

outsidespace@ft.com